However, last month, Aspire co-organised a festival honouring a number of hardliners and extremists, including Mohammed al-Arifi, who is banned from the UK after being accused of radicalising young Britons, urging them to join the jihad in Syria.

Al-Arifi spoke at the hardline Cardiff mosque, Al-Manar, attended by Nasser Muthana and Reyaad Khan, the Welsh teenagers who shocked the country in June when they appeared in a propaganda video for the terror group Isis.

Al-Arifi has called for a holy war in Syria and stated that “Muslims will have no life without jihad… We will only overcome humiliation with jihad.”

Three weeks after he was banned, he re-emerged, on July 14, as a lecturer at Aspire’s festival in Doha, The Promise of Mercy, where he was honoured by two members of the Qatari royal family.

Another extremist speaking at the festival was Wagdy Ghoneim, banned by Britain in 2009 as a “hate promoter” who seeks to “provoke others to commit terrorist acts”.

Extremist event in Qatar, with the Aspire logo in the background

Ghoneim has praised Osama bin Laden as a “hero and martyr” and was recorded leading audiences in anti-Semitic songs with the chorus “No to the Jews, descendants of the apes”.

There were two speeches by Zaghloul El-Naggar, author of an anti-Semitic book claiming that September 11 was a Western and Zionist conspiracy against Muslims.

Another speaker, Nabil Al Awadhy, sponsored the “Great Kuwait Campaign” to support 12,000 fighters in Syria. The campaign claims to have raised several million dollars to buy anti-aircraft missiles, and was also planning to buy heat-seeking missiles.

The disclosure of Aspire’s jihadist links will add to concerns about the security risk of awarding the World Cup to Qatar. Leaked documents revealed that the country was assessed as having the greatest risk of terrorist attack of any the bidding nations.

A security assessment by a Fifa consultant, Andre Pruis, said it had a “high security risk” because of its proximity to countries with an “al-Qaeda presence”. The other contenders were rated as low-to-medium security risk.

Qatar has long been sympathetic to some forms of Islamist radicalism. Khaled Meshaal, the leader of Hamas, enjoys sanctuary in the country, and the emirate has paid Hamas millions of dollars.

The chairman until recently of the World Cup security committee, Sheikh Abdullah bin Nasser bin Khalifa al-Thani, recently hosted the Hamas interior minister, Fathi Hamad, who has called for violent jihad and the destruction of Israel. Sheikh Abdullah is now chairman of the World Cup delivery and legacy committee.

The selection for the 2022 cup of tiny Qatar, one of the world’s hottest nations and with no football tradition, surprised many.

The country is being investigated for securing the event by bribery after a Sunday newspaper obtained millions of documents that it said showed Mohamed bin Hammam, a Qatari former Fifa executive committee member, paid £3 million in cash and gifts to African officials allegedly to help secure Qatar’s bid. Qatar denies the charges.

Aspire is not embroiled in the bribery scandal, but played a subtler part in raising the profile of Qatar’s bid in the Third World. The academy has a huge talent-spotting programme, Football Dreams, focused on developing countries without much record of producing international footballers, but that have influential swing voters on Fifa’s executive committee.

Football Dreams puts around 500,000 teenagers a year through trials in 16 countries in Africa, Asia and the Americas. However, only a fraction of the boys – 20 a year – are selected for full training at the Aspire Academy.

Football Dreams has opened a large scouting programme in Guatemala, a country with a small population and little international football tradition, currently 134th in Fifa’s world rankings. It has also opened a substantial programme – and in the past spoken of opening a satellite academy – in Thailand, 157th in the rankings and with an equally poor history of producing international players. Both countries do, however, have members on Fifa’s powerful executive committee.

The only South American country in which Football Dreams operates is also one of the smallest and least football-minded, Paraguay, whose national team is 48th in the Fifa rankings. However, Nicolas Leoz, the South American Football Federation president, widely believed to have been key to delivering South American block votes for Qatar’s bid, is Paraguayan.

Aspire also has close links to Spain, which supported the bid. Bonus Sports Marketing, a company owned by Sandro Rosell, FC Barcelona’s former president, has been awarded the contract to run the massive Football Dreams scheme.

The British Council is funding programmes with Aspire as part of an initiative focusing on sport and health.